Oculus Quest owners are going to be able to do a lot more with their hands in the coming months.
The Facebook-owned VR company announced Monday, May 18 that hand tracking on Quest will go from an experimental feature to general release this week.
The first third-party games allowing players to interact with virtual worlds without using controllers will be in stores starting May 28.
It’s a big leap forward to Oculus, which is celebrating the one-year anniversary of the Quest. By incorporating the use of real hands into games, VR becomes more accessible to a wider group of users, who may be intimidated by current controllers.
Four games (all created by Oculus) currently utilize hand tracking in its experimental phase and are available now in the Oculus Store.
To date, Quest owners have spend $100 million on VR content for the system. More than 20 games have made more than $1 million each and over 10 have topped $2 million in revenues on Quest.
While Oculus did not give out sales numbers, one of the flagship games for the system has been Beat Saber. To keep that momentum going, the developers of that game announced plans to launch 20 new beatmaps on May 25 in a free update — 10 with 360-degree support and 10 with one-saber support.
Tracks will include Green Day’s American Idiot”and Timbaland’s While We’re Young.
The absolutely absurd idea of putting a touchscreen display on a mouse isn't exactly new. Turtle Beach already did it with its Command Series MC7, which features a 2.25-inch control screen. But apparently, even that wasn't ridiculous enough for Arctic Fox Technologies. Its new Super Mouse looks like someone took the chunky old Atari ST mouse, slapped a touchscreen and scroll wheel on it, and called it an upgrade.
The result is a rather unusual-looking mouse that is now on Kickstarter, starting at $199. And as ridiculous as it looks, some of its features are genuinely intriguing.
Apple is less than a day away from launching its highly anticipated OLED MacBook Pro with a touch-sensitive screen. But it appears that the upgrade is going to cost a pretty penny. According to a report by Bloomberg, Apple is reportedly eyeing a starting price of $2,899 for the 14-inch MacBook Pro, while the 16-inch version could start at $3,399 in the US.
"At $2,899, the 14-inch model would mark the highest starting price for a new MacBook Pro model, surpassing the $2,799 Apple charged for a 17-inch version introduced in 2006," says the report. The report claims that Apple is targeting a minimum price hike of $400 for its upcoming redesigned 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro models.
I've spent a good amount of time digging into the spec sheet of the new M6 MacBook Pro (14-inch), and for all intents and purposes, this is a classic Apple "chip and connectivity" refresh. It's not a full redesign. The chassis, Liquid Retina XDR panel, speakers, ports, and battery, all of them carry over unchanged.
However, the M6 brings more cores, stronger on-device AI, higher memory bandwidth on the larger configs, and modern wireless. Here’s the practical rundown of what actually improved, and whether those gains are worth your money.